[sword-devel] Copyright/Locked modules

[Chris Little]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Jonathan Hunt wrote:

> Yes I contact Navpress a few days ago to see if they would be open to
> allowing the creation of a module and was turned down. Letter is pasted
> in below: I am wondering since this seem to be more the one place the
> has turned Sword project down but allowed E-Sword to publish for free if
> its feasible to add a filter on Sword so that it can read E-Sword files.
> This wouldn't be breaking copyright because E-Sword is still the one
> supplying the files and we are not modifying them at all.

That's too bad.  Oh well.

There are two problems with the suggestion of using the e-Sword module, 
one technical, the other legal.

The technical problem stems from e-Sword's use of Jet databases as 
modules.  That in itself is quite sufficient to prevent our use of them 
since we aren't going to write a Jet database engine.

The other is the DMCA (because only under the US's current oppressive
regime would MS's Jet database passwords be considered any kind of
copyright control system) since the e-Sword databases are password
protected.  If we got Rick Myers' permission, we could get through the
password/DMCA issues, but there's still the first issue--so it's not even 
an issue.

--Chris